EDITORIAL -- A Perk That Rankles

Published
4:00 am PDT, Friday, July 7, 1995

AT A TIME when vital university medical research is threatened with steep, ill-advised cuts, college officials do themselves little good by arrogantly defending use of taxpayer money to finance college for researchers' relatives.

"We don't have any apologies for it," a Johns Hopkins University official curtly told the Associated Press when asked about the policy of using federal funds to pay the tuition of the children, spouses and same- sex domestic partners of faculty members working on federal research.

Admittedly, this is a long-standing tradition agreed to by the government's grant overseers. But longevity by itself does not make a policy right, especially when the roof is falling in on every other segment of society in the frenzy to balance the budget.

It is difficult for someone on Medicare to understand why his share of health-care costs must go up when professionals making $50,000, $100,000 or more a year continue to receive generous federal help in putting their children through college.

Johns Hopkins, Stanford, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago are four universities known to have charged the government $17 million for tuition benefits between 1991 and 1993. They argue that they would lose top scientists to private industry if they could not offer such a bonus.

Fine, give the researchers the benefit. But take the money from university funds, not from a purse that should be used more directly for finding a cure for cancer, or AIDS, or Alzheimer's.

Universities have every right to offer dependent tuition packages to employees, but not when taxpayers who are struggling to send their own children to college must pick up the tab.

Stanford, especially, should be sensitive to the repercussions of a knee-jerk defense of use of federal research money. That kind of attitude caused chaos and acrimony four years ago when federal research dollars were used for entertainment, flowers and other perquisites in the president's house.